Obsession, for Geeks.

Not that I'm obsessed with geeks. Not that there's anything wrong with people who are. I'm just a geek. Obsessed.

Okay, we have the ballsed-up opener out of the way, what do I mean exactly?

I have a new PC- well, how long do you have to own something before it ceases to be new?- and I just can't stop tinkering with it. I've always done this, with almost everything I own. I have to have whatever it is running or operating at the best it can possibly run.
It probably started with my ZX Spectrum and just rolled on from there. Now it's anything- ANYTHING.
Video Game consoles seem to have less customizable features now. The PS3 leads the pack, kind of- if Sony could just leave it alone and stop picking at it. But bearing my prior admission in mind, that's a tad hypocritical of me to say so.

But I don't think it stops there. This could just be me, but I'm acutely aware of my ability to switch my focus from one new shiny thing to the next. Case in point, I have a 360 and a PS3 in my living room but I know that I damn well haven't used them for anything other than Blu Rays or Netflix since I finally got my PC into a usable state.
Maybe it's a mild case of autism- god knows I'm an unsociable bastard, but that would just be a nice excuse. It could be an offshoot of how modern marketing is constantly keeping us unsatisfied and off balance, deliberately to make us want the next big thing.

However, it's most likely just being a geek. Video game geeks in particular, we can't help but think about the next game. Sure, there are people still playing Battlefield 2 right now- and I might join you at some point- but I guarantee a lot of the mid-game conversations have been about BF3, even before it was officially announced.

When I was a kid in England, I used to read Mean Machines constantly. A multi-platform, highly irreverent magazine that, even if the copy was a year old, I'd pore over every page- reading magazines and comics from a young age probably improved my writing and English Language usage. But one thing I recollect now is that we never had the sheer volume of coverage we have now. We may have had just as many games that got one mention and then never appeared, but more often than not we only knew about something's existence in the very short space before it hit the shelves. I didn't even know anything about Landstalker before I saw it calling to me from a wall-display at the shop that has long since left the earth- yet I still remember pestering the shit out of my mom to get it for me.

Now, we hear rumors of games that haven't even begun pre-production now. This is like the milkman hasn't even took his sunglasses off before we can even witness the gleam in his eye. But it's cheap to do. The internet just needs rumor and then a thousand blogs can drum up demand. Proto-demand.

Does all of this have a point? Not really- made you look. But maybe I'm not alone in feeling never satisfied enough by stuff. There's a point in the film American Splendor, when the real Harvey Pekar is talking about going around yard sales, looking for obscure jazz records and says:

"I was always a collector. I admit to having an obsessive-compulsive quality in me."

And it just always rang true. Maybe it's just a god-shaped hole in me. If so, God shaped kind of like a Sega Megadrive/Genesis- which I NEED to have, BTW...